Posted by Shashi Kiran August 23, 2016

With cyber-attacks on the ascent, the need to strengthen the security posture and be responsive is top of mind for CIOs, CEOs and CISOs. Security is very closely interlinked to all aspects of the business and has a direct bearing on business reputation, privacy and intellectual property. Unfortunately, the IT stack continues to get complicated even as attacks continue to get sophisticated. Further artificial simulations undertaken without a real-world replica or a virtual-only scenario can often overlook vulnerabilities that could not be seen in a simulated environment. And in the cases where an investment is made in building the complex testing infrastructure, it can often be cost prohibitive aside from the time spent to set up and tear down infrastructure and applications. This is where traditional security test beds run into bottlenecks, as they require significant, costly investments in hardware and personnel—and even then cannot scale effectively to address today’s growing network traffic volume and ever-more-complex attack vectors. Government, military, and commercial organizations are deploying “cyber ranges,” test beds that allow war games and simulations to strengthen cyber security defenses and skills.

Quali has always been involved in making these test beds highly efficient, cost-effective and scalable. Over the last few years Quali’s flagship product CloudShell has provided the ability to replicate large scale, complex and diverse networks. It can orchestrate a hybrid sandbox containing both virtual and physical resources needed for the assessment of cybertechnologies. Because cyber ranges are controlled sandbox, CloudShell resource management and automation features provides the ability to stand up and tear down cyber range sandbox as needed in a repeatable manner. Operational conditions and configurations are easily replicated to re-test cyber-attack scenarios. This sandbox utilizes resources such Ixia BreakingPoint, intrusion detection, malware analyzers, firewall appliances, and common services such as email and file servers. The sandbox resources are isolated into white, red and blue team areas for cyber warfare exercise scenarios in a controlled sandbox.

Today we announced how we took this capability a step further in association with Cypherpath to provide containerized portable infrastructure to support virtual sandboxes and cyber agents. Through this partnership, joint customers can use on-demand containerized infrastructures to create and manage cyber ranges and private cloud sandboxes. Through full infrastructure and IT environment virtualization and automation, security conscious enterprises can save millions of dollars in costs associated with creating, delivering and managing the full stack of physical compute, network and storage resources in highly secure containers.

One such customer is the United States Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) the premier combat support agency of the Department of Defense (DoD). According to Ernet McCaleb, ManTech technical director and DISA Cyber Range chief architect this solution provided them with the means to fulfil their mission without sacrificing performance or security and deliver their MPLS stack at a fraction of the cost.

Cyber Ranges are not just for federal defense establishments alone. They have broader applicability across the Enterprise.

Top 3 Reasons to use Cyber Ranges

Lower costs of simulating Security testing

Increase agility and responsiveness by combining automation with cyber ranges

Does it allow modeling of physical, virtual and modern containerized environments?

What’s the cost of building and operating one?

Teams from Quali and Cypherpath have developed a joint solution brief that can be accessed here.

Finally, as an interesting side note, CloudShell’s capabilities allowed system integrators like TSI to model tools like Cypherpath in. This becomes important as the modern IT landscape continues to evolve and allows not just security professionals, but DevOps teams, cloud architects and other system integrators to leverage the standards-based approach CloudShell has taken towards its “shells” including its open source initiatives.

As enterprises bring newer security tools into their arsenal against cyber-attacks, the modern cyber ranger solutions from the likes of Quali and Cypherpath should definitely be on top of their consideration list.